T.R. Johnson Past Interviews

VOICES ON: Creating Pleasurable Experiences in the Composition Course T. R. Johnson earned his Ph.D. from the University of Louisville in Composition Studies. Recent publications include "An Apology for Pleasure, or Rethinking Romanticism and the Student Writer" in Composition Studies 26 (1998), and "Writing as Therapy and the Rhetorical Tradition: Sorting out Plato, Postmodernism, Writing Pedagogy, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder," in The Tekne of Healing: Writing Toward Wholeness (1998). He currently directs the writing center at the University of New Orleans. Why do you think it is important to talk about pleasure? I think we need to start a conversation about pleasure, first, because we never have. In all the vast body of research and theory on composing that we've generated over the last thirty years or so, none of it addresses that strange, pleasant feeling that sometimes happens when our writing is going well. This feeling is probably what lured a great many of us to dedicate our intellectual lives to thinking about writing in the first place. Also, if we can develop a cogent theory of what authorial pleasure is, we stand a much better chance of making it available to our students, and they, in turn, will therefore spend more time on their writing, get better at it, and even continue to think about it long after they've fulfilled the standard freshmen requirement. Also, I worry that when we made our social or theoretical turn in the mid- to late 1980s, we came to neglect the experience of the student-writer, and, after all, a great deal of what we're after as writing teachers has to do with coaxing our students into a certain kind of rigorous experience with language. Finally, I always remember something Elaine Scarry discussed in her book, The Body in Pain, that resonates with particular strength in the current academic landscape, and, especially, in departments of English, where so much has changed so quickly. She says that wherever there are destabilized belief systems or deeply challenged institutional self-conceptions, whenever the ordering mechanisms of a population come to seem unreal or arbitrary, there arises in the midst of such anxiety and frustration a corresponding will to re-anchor and re-inscribe these structures to make them most immediately real, most deeply felt. That is, in the name of these belief systems, the dirty work of inflicting pain gets underway. If Scarry's grim thesis holds true, then we are quick to see the students who come to hate writing and flunk out not as symptoms of our own confusion; rather we acknowledge them only in the way that an obscure terrorist sect might: as proof of the seriousness of our own agenda, as a means to advance and bolster our claims to authority. In an environment as ripe for pain as the current composition course is, I call for us to think seriously about what sorts of experiences we create for our students, and, specifically, how to make that experience as positive as possible. What can we do to increase the pleasures of writing on a day-to-day basis? I'm keenly interested in the use of stylistic devices as a means by which students can learn to play with words. As the late Bob Connors argued in one of his final essays, "The Erasure of the Sentence," certain kinds of sentence-level rhetorics and pedagogies were held in high and widespread esteem in the United States as recently as the early 1980s. Students, apparently, took great pleasure in tinkering with ways of organizing sentences, playing around with stylistic figures, tropes, techniques, and so on. And it seemed to make them better writers. As Connors points out, no research ever proved otherwise. This sort of play helps the student see the classroom environment as a place where he or she can try out different ways of saying things, and, as such, the student is rescued from the view of academic discourse as an alien monolith of perfect authority that he or she can never hope to master. What's more, as the student plays around with style, he or she will think about the different verbal configurations from the point of view of the reader. That is, the student-writer will have to think about how one way of arranging things affects a reader as opposed to another way, and this sort of doubling in his or her consciousness, this braiding of the role of reader and writer, creates a kind of inner dialogue that loosens the barriers of the ego and allows the felt sense or unconscious desire to assert itself. This relaxation, this invitation to desire, opens the way for a pleasurable experience of writing. How might we read student writing with an interest in the pleasures of writing? Sometimes people assume that if the teacher is interested in pleasure, then he or she must be very lax with regard to teaching the conventions that enable successful communication. That is, people locate pleasure in a hazy binary with discipline, and then assume that our pedagogic mission has nothing to do with the former and everything to do with the latter. As I hope I've made clear in the previous answer, pleasure and the sorts of clarity prized by academic audiences are by no means mutually exclusive; on the contrary, we can teach students to cultivate them both at the same time by drawing their attention to questions of style. What do you think this way of thinking could bring to the field of composition studies? I think it could give us a way to focus, concretely, our interest in composing-as-a-process. That is, rather than just encouraging students to generate multiple drafts (a great practice, of course), we can encourage them to play with key moments in their text from the standpoint of style. Revision then becomes a more disciplined, more pointed activity. Also, as I noted in answer to the first question, this way of thinking could help us enable students to enjoy writing. And the more they enjoy it, the harder they'll work at it. And the harder they work, the better their writing will become.

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